I've got a boatload of legacy project files that use a $(ProjectRoot) variable in include paths to refer to the root of the source tree. We define the variable in our visual studio environment so desktop builds can find their way to the tfs workspace in use.
I would like to define this variable in the Team Build environment via an MSBuild command line option in my tfs build definition, but I can't seem to find a way that works. I found an answer (List of msbuild properties TFS passes to a build script) with a list of variables and SolutionRoot looked promising.
When I put /p:ProjectRoot=$(SolutionRoot) in the MSBuild Arguments for my build definition, ProjectRoot ends up empty. I want it to expand to something like D:\Builds\18\TfsProject\BuildDef\src\
Is there a way to define my variable with the value of the root of the workspace sources in Team Build?
Note: I tried to figure this out in TFS2010 and finally gave up and modified the BuildProcessTemplate to define the variable using the SourcesDirectory variable that's available inside that context. I thought I'd take another run at it in the hopes of using the new template in TFS2013 without modification, but I'm still stumped.
UPDATE: Turns out the syntax I had in my MSBuild Arguments would work if the variable I'm dereferencing were actually being passed to msbuild. The list from the other post I reference seems to no longer be valid. Looking at the detailed Team Build logs, it looks like the only variables being passed in to msbuild in Team Build are OutDir, BuildId, BuildLabel, BuildTimestamp, BuildSourceVersion, and BuildDefinition. None of those gives me the info my current msbuild scripts need at build time so I'm stuck with either reworking all our project files or continuing with the BuildProcessTemplate modifications I've been using. Unless someone comes along with a better answer here.
